It all started with an email. I was in my dressing room on August 8, 2009, taking off my makeup after a performance. I’d been on tour for almost a year as one of three dancers in David Byrne’s show for the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, and my whole life felt electric. I was kicking it, working hard with my creative heroes and seriously starting to feel my power as an artist, as a woman.

That night we were in Edinburgh, Scotland. I’d been getting a lot of fan emails, but this one stopped me in my tracks. The sender said he’d seen us in Lyon, France, a week before and went into detail about my performance. He mentioned wanting to work together in a company he was starting, but something about his tone made the hair on my neck stand up. He was too familiar, too intimate in the way he described how I danced.

I honestly don’t remember whether I answered that email. If I did, it would have been a “Thank you, glad to inspire,” which I generally said to our fans. What I do know is that, despite seven years and hundreds of emails, letters, Facebook messages, phone calls, and packages—despite him showing up in person to hunt me down—I have never once responded since. And although experts have told me that’s exactly what I should keep doing, warning me that to acknowledge him in any way would only feed the fire, I’ve had enough. After months of agonizing deliberation, I’ve decided to go public. I want to be a voice for people who haven’t found theirs, and to call attention to the terror of stalking. And I want to say to my own stalker, right here and right now: Stop.

“I know you love me, Lily”Back to where it began. Finishing up the tour, I forgot about the email. And when I got home to New York, I rented a funky sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village. I was ready to move on from the dance world and try putting my artistic energies into making films. Fortunately, I still had private clients from a fitness and wellness business I’d started before going on the road, which would help pay the bills—but that website is where Z (I won’t give him the power of using his name) must have found my contact info.

By January 2010 he was coming on strong: In just two weeks he called 20 times and sent eight packages. I never answered the phone, but the packages I did open; they were full of eerie mementos that he said reminded him of me—ticket stubs, a crushed beer can, a napkin from a ­restaurant, a scrawled letter saying, “I know you love me, Lily, I really do.” In one package I found a crinkled Xerox of his passport photo: a worn man with pasty skin and sharp eyes. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, and I forced myself not to remember his face.

But he kept coming back. By February he was maxing out my voice mail, and even though I knew I’d lose business, I finally changed my number. The calls ended, but the emails didn’t—five, 10, 12 pages of poems or hostile observations. (“My anger has been building…and it’s partly about you,” read one. “APOLOGISE or i’ll tell them you’re PSYCHOTIC,” said another.) His intense scrutiny of everything I did was deeply disturbing. “I viewed an online video of one of your performances and…I felt you were choking inside,” he’d say, or “You’re here but you’re gone, it’s in your eyes. Something’s wrong.”

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Friends and family told me just to block him, but I didn’t. I felt knowledge would protect me. If he said he was going to wait for me at the bodega on Friday, I knew where not to be. Logging every message became a brutal exercise, but I got good at it. And on April 20, 2010, I also had a legal firm send a cease and desist letter, telling him to stop contacting me. He didn’t listen, and in fact, on August 9, 2011, he showed up in New York City, walked into a company I’d worked with, and told them he was off to search for me at every dance studio in town.

For the first time, I was truly afraid.

“You can guess where I’m going next week, or need I spell it out?”Z’s coming to my city was a crossing-the-­Rubicon moment, in the words of my new lawyer. With the emails and evidence I had saved showing a clear escalation of stalking behavior, we were able to get detectives at the Manhattan district attorney’s office involved in the case. But after a short stay, Z returned to Europe, and I went back to pretending he didn’t exist. Still, I questioned how I should exist: As a woman, how do I use my power to make people pay attention to what I have to say without attracting unwanted gaze? As an artist, how do I express myself in public when I have to stay private to be safe?

Over the next two years, Z continued emailing, but I was mostly able to tune out his presence. That came to a terrifying halt in May 2013, when I bumped into a woman I’d done a video with years before. “Oh, I met your friend the other night,” she said, cheerfully describing Z. “He mentioned you guys were working together? He’s so sweet.” I could feel my face drop. He must have scoured every video I’d ever done and somehow tracked down this woman at a dance event. Holy sh-t, I thought, he’s back.

I alerted the D.A.’s team, which was still on the case. Over the next few days, I planned an escape route everywhere I went—even my coffee shop. Everything felt infused with danger. One night I came home late to find my door open a crack. The scene was right out of a horror film: I knocked. “Hello? Hello?” Finally I pushed the door open, and the place was just as I’d left it; no one was there. I called 911. As I stood waiting for someone to come, I imagined Z’s hands on the doorknob. Had he been there? Did he do this? Was he f--king with me?

I never found out what happened. But I immediately escaped to Los Angeles in search of somewhere safe and rented a bungalow with my boyfriend. We’d been long-distance for about three years, and with the stakes so high now, our relationship took on new meaning. Together we settled into a domestic rhythm, and as I worked furiously on a new film, Sleepover LA, the editing became an outlet for my anxiety, as if this were the one story I could control. But the respite was brief. “You never contact me…which is why I’m angry,” Z wrote on June 19. “If you don’t act it’s all going to tumble down…you can guess where I’m going next week, or need I spell it out? I have absolutely nothing to lose.”

I was having tea at a friend’s place in Silver Lake when my phone rang. “He just landed in L.A.,” my lawyer said. He went on to relay advice from the investigators: Disappear, don’t go anywhere you usually do, and tell only a few select people where you are. I stumbled outside into the middle of the street and stopped, feeling as if I were in quicksand. It’s true, Z had shown up in New York—twice—but I’d had the protection of the detectives and my lawyer there. Now they were 3,000 miles away, telling me to hide. I didn’t know where to turn. This stranger could be anywhere. It was a glorious day, and I could see the palm trees down Sunset Boulevard, that iconic image of Hollywood dreams. And suddenly it all looked dirty—the places I loved, contaminated.

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I got in my car and locked the doors and rolled up the windows. I called my boyfriend. I called my parents. And I said, “I don’t know what to do.”

“I will do everything I need to do to be with you”I ended up checking into the Chateau Marmont (ultraexpensive but known for keeping celebrities incognito) under a pseudonym. There, surrounded by luxury, my mind began to play games on me: I’d see Z’s face in the shadows or imagine someone attacking me as I waited for the elevator. I kept switching rooms and always wore a disguise, my hand white-knuckling the pepper spray in my bag. Meanwhile, Z was emailing: He’d gone looking for me at a studio where I’d once done a YouTube interview; he invited me to a pool party nearby. My boyfriend tried to reassure me, but I’d become so suspicious of everyone, even him.

On July 11, I had sneaked out for a walk when I noticed I had a voice mail, from my lawyer. “Hi, Lily,” he said. “They have him. They got him at baggage.” I still have that call saved on my phone—5:35 P.M. exactly—because the relief the 20-­second message gave me was so huge. Z had been apprehended in Newark, New Jersey, where he’d flown from L.A. Now I was on the offensive. A trial was quickly scheduled; I had three weeks to gear up for it.

“You’re playing with fire”Back in New York, Z faced charges of five misdemeanors of stalking and harassment. I was amped, ready to finally take him down in court. But before I had the chance, he was found mentally ill and deemed incompetent to stand trial. It’s a legal procedure known as a 730 exam, and when the charges are only mis­demeanors, a case can be automatically dismissed, which mine was, along with the order of protection I’d worked so hard to get. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from beneath me. And I’m furious now, because despite five weeks of jail time, several months in a psychiatric facility, and his being ushered out of the country, Z is still at it on Facebook, sending messages like, “I don’t want to hurt you; but I think it’s necessary you understand…you’re playing with fire.”

If Z had been charged with a felony, the case would have gone to court. And that’s the point: We must rethink how we measure violence. Z has never explicitly threatened me with imminent physical harm, but his unrelenting, nonconsensual contact and implicit threats were—and continue to be—a serious violation that should be deemed a felony. He has eroded my ability to trust and left me living in fear. The way he’s tracking every single thing I do is insidious.

Ever since those first emails, I’ve wanted to scream, “What do you want? Why me? You don’t know me for sh-t!” I’ve held myself back and played by the rules. But I can’t anymore. One out of seven women in America has been stalked, according to the most recent data. And just 41 percent of incidents are reported to the police. I must call attention to this issue. I want the stalking laws to better protect us. I want people to recognize the damage this invisible violence inflicts. I’m done with the silence, because keeping a secret eats away at your sense of self.

Experts tell me it’s dangerous to go public (yes, I do have a safety plan in place). But only 11 percent of stalkers pursue their victims five years or more; Z is at seven and counting. That’s why I’m determined to take back my power. If no one speaks out, nothing will change. It’s also why I was compelled to make stalking the subject of my next film, Glass, a fictionalized version of my personal experience, and to tell my story to Glamour.

I’m scared to do this. But even more, I’m angry. I want people like me to know they’re not alone. I’m sick of being trapped by a stranger’s fantasy, and I am ready to be free again.